“Believe me,
what you learn at school about a job is only a quarter of what it is in real
life.” Newly graduated people often hear this sentence which aims at acting as
a precursory immersion in the ‘real’ working world. Theory learning is, of
course, essential to the understanding of a profession, but it does not make it
all. The internship experience actually confirmed this conception, and was
therefore a rich and intensive learning experience. What we learned during the
3 years at University is definitely more than useful, but practice in the ‘real
world’ industry provides invaluable insights in the framework of a profession.
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| By Riccardo Cuppini |
As for my
personal experience in the public relations field in Mauritius, I learned a lot
on the local framework given to the profession. The company for which I worked
provides consultancy services in public relations and event management mainly. Therefore
I had the chance to work on different projects coming from different types of
clients or industries. One of the main insights I gained from my internship is
on how media works in Mauritius. Several directions had to be followed when
issuing information to the media so as to receive media coverage. The
guidelines that I learned from Curtin are essentially influenced by the Australian
media environment; therefore I had to adapt my understandings of how to deal with
the media to the Mauritian context. For example, I had to translate several
media releases, sent by our client Emirates, from English to French to suit the
local media companies. Moreover, the format of the media releases was not as
per the format that we usually used for our university assignments. I learned
how to format a media release according to the Mauritian media context. Another
example would be media monitoring activities. At Odysseus Public Relations,
media monitoring was done in both offline and online media, and media clippings
were essentially done in digital format to suit the clients’ needs. Practice
made me relatively conversant with the Mauritian media rules and context.
Interviewing
a client and pitching a communication project in real life was also one of the
most insightful experiences of my internship. Doing so in an educational
context was definitely a valuable formation, but evolving in the ‘real world’
of communication industries added another dimension to the importance of the
task. I had the opportunity to interview a Marketing Manager who wanted to
create a social media campaign for the company. This invaluable experience weirdly
happened to be less stressful than the ones I did at university. Moreover,
working on the social media campaign project with a colleague and pitching it
to the client were other insightful steps which made me understand more how the
public relations profession works. For this particular work experience, I shall
reckon that all the communication plans that we did throughout the 3 years at
university were of considerable help. Indeed, practice here made it all: both
practice at school and at work.
University
life is nearly finished, and practice in the ‘real world’ will surely soon turn
us into efficient professionals.
Thanks for
reading!
Sonia Monty
15886499
